Terence Mckenna - Navigating the invisible landscape

An Ecology of Souls Navigating the Invisible Landscape "Oh, that it were possible we might but hold some two days' conference with the dead." John Webster It occured to me with greater and greater force and largely prompted by giving DMT occassionally to Tibetans and Amazonian shamans and when you say to them, you know, to the shamans in the Amazon, when you say to them "What is happening with this stuff and what are those little things in there?" They say, "Oh, well those are ancestor spirits. Didn't you know? Haven't you heard? Shamanism is about doing healing through the intercession of ancestor spirits." And I say, "Hmm, ancestor spirits... let's get this straight -- dead people is what your talking about, right? these are dead people?" And, you know, maybe because I was raised Catholic I resisted this like grim death. But I'm beginning to think that what you actually break into in that place is something that we might call an ecology of souls. That, um, is it possible to entertain the notion that at death you actually don't just become worm food, but but that something survives in some other dimension and that it has this bizarre character to it? And that this explains their peculiar affection for humanity and their involvement...somehow... in our, um, fate. Well, this is to me fairly mind-bending as a possibility. If what is awaiting us at the end of the 20th century is the erasure of the boundary between the living and the dead, then we've all been too conservative in our projections of wh-what is, uh, going on. Yeah... The Loophole As you know, shamans -- in all times and places -- gain their power through relationships with helping spirits. To understand the living you gotta commune with the dead. Somehow, the acquisition to a disincarnate intelligence is the precondition for authentic shamanism. The third most important person in the theocracy in Tibet is known as the State Oracle. Now, nowhere in our world do we have an institution like that that we do not consider pathological except in the now very thinly spread tradition of the Muse. Do you know what a Muse is? A Muse? Yeah. I think so... I'm going to take you on... Really? So I've got a Muse I've got my own Muse! Artists, alone among human beings, are given permission to talk in terms of my inspiration or a voice which told me to do this or, uh, a vision that must be realized... The self is only that which is in the process of becoming. Art? Same thing. James Joyce had something to say about it too... "Welcome, O life I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscious of my race." If society is to somehow take hold of itself at this penultimate moment as we literally waiver on the brink of planetary extinction, then the artist -- like Ariadne following her thread out of the labyrinth -- is going to have to follow this shamanic thread back through time... Embrace Your Muse to follow your thread through the Invisible Landscape We have been disempowered by a rational tendency to deny our irriational roots, which are a kind of embarassment to science because science is, uh, the special province of the ego. And magic and art are the special province of something else. I could name it but I won't. It prefers to be unnamed, I think... "Nature loves courage. This is the shamanic dance in the waterfall. This is how magic is done. By hurling yourself into the abyss and discovering it's a feather bed.'' Terence McKenna 1946 - 2000 You are missed. Compiled by LelaBear with my muse ;) from images on the World Wide Web Music by Philip Glass Koyaanisqatsi: Life out of Balance Excepts from Terence McKenna's Lectures: Tree of Knowledge The Nature of Creativity In Lak'ech I am -- as always -- another yourself